President Áder Urges Turning Point in Fight against Climate Change

MTI-Hungary Today 2019.01.08.

The year ahead could see a turning point in the fight against climate change and this opportunity must not be wasted, President János Áder said at a New Year’s reception to members of the diplomatic corps in Budapest on Monday.

The president warned that time is running out for the world to respond to the mounting threat of climate change.

He said the world would have to decide quickly what it wants to do about the issue, noting that “despite our commitments”, greenhouse gas emissions rose again in 2018.

Áder also lamented what he called a lack of serious progress in the talks that have taken place since the 2015 Paris climate summit. “The best that can be said about the [2018] summit in Katowice is that we averted the collapse of the Paris Agreement,” he added.

“Today we are further away from the two degrees target than we were three years ago in Paris,” the president said, referring to the main pledge of the Paris Agreement of keeping global temperature rise at below 2 C.

Though we have a rulebook in place that will allow the implementation of the Paris Agreement to begin in 2021, we do not have the courage to enact the decisions needed to stop runaway climate change”

But what is really at stake is the future of human civilisation, he warned. “Most importantly, we must change the way we look at things.”

“We ourselves created most of the problems we face today, so who else can we expect to solve them?” he asked.

There will be much to get done in every country to make 2019 the year of a turning point and the opportunity to make it one must not go to waste, Áder said.

He said the world had most of the technological knowledge needed to make progress in the fight against climate change, adding that the necessary conditions for international cooperation were also in place.